"Horror doesn’t necessarily need to feel surprising (in fact, some of the best horror tortures viewers with the predictably inevitable), but “New Year, New You,” released at the end of December, presents an incredibly taut plot which twist and unfolds in unpredictable ways and showcases up and coming episode director and co-writer Sophia Takal’s talent. Daniel Kurland wrote that “New Year, New You” is “a chilling story that only gets darker and more complex as it goes on. It also doesn’t shy away from an incredibly bleak ending that makes her point with eerie poignancy. Takal doesn’t try to overextend herself and this boiled down take on friendship and jealousy gone wrong is arguably the best addition of Into the Dark to date and hopefully just the start of Takal’s filmmaking career.” Without giving too much away, let’s just say that at first you think the episode is about surviving trauma before you think it’s about bullying before you think it’s about the lengths people will go to for internet fame before you think it’s about the particular derangement of an individual human soul. “New Year, New You” is good horror because its critique of human vanity uses the internet as a medium without reducing it to a cause. As William Burroughs said in another context, the evil was already there, waiting."

"The following is a list of unidentified, or formerly unidentified, sounds. All of the sound files in this article have been sped up by at least a factor of 16 to increase intelligibility by condensing them and raising the frequency from infrasound to a more audible and reproducible range."

"But the town is real. Or as real as any ahistorical, prefabricated, American village. And the scene is a perfect synecdoche for the show’s message. In America, we’ve blurred the line between real and fake in order to facilitate a sense of liberation. From pain. From history. From our own moral failures. And the memory-erasing drug given to the soldiers is, in a sense, meant to make them more like their civilian counterparts, trapped as they are in a placeless void untethered from memory and obligation. Sure, the show could occasionally make its concerns more explicit. It does sometimes let the characters slip out of pocket and meander a bit from the symbolic roles they’re supposed to be playing. But hopefully that’s just praising with faint damnation, because the show is high quality and carries an important message: Moral obligation begins with memory. And as long as we still have boots on the ground in the Middle East and veterans back home, that’s a message that will remain relevant."

"The catalog calls the show a “collaboration between an artificial intelligence named AICAN and its creator, Dr. Ahmed Elgammal,” a move meant to spotlight, and anthropomorphize, the machine-learning algorithm that did most of the work. According to HG Contemporary, it’s the first solo gallery exhibit devoted to an AI artist."

"There really isn’t such a thing as true secularism in modern society. As the philosopher John Gray writes, “if [secularism] means a type of society in which religion is absent, secularism is a kind of contradiction, for it is defined by what it excludes.”

Even those who call themselves atheists still experience reality predominantly through a religious worldview, and even the horrors of existence so colorfully articulated by self-labeled nihilists depend in large part on a vague sense of transcendent order. These fundamental truths provide the basis for New English Review’s latest release, The Terror of Existence: From Ecclesiastes to Theater of the Absurd, co-written by Theodore Dalrymple and Kenneth Francis."